Vehicles operating in an autonomous mode (e.g., driverless) can relieve occupants, especially the driver, from some driving-related responsibilities. When operating in an autonomous mode, the vehicle can navigate to various locations using onboard sensors, allowing the vehicle to travel with minimal human interaction or in some cases without any passengers.
Motion planning and control are critical operations in autonomous driving. Most of the planning and control operations are performed based on sensor data obtained from various sensors such as an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a light detection and range (LIDAR) unit, and RADAR sensors. In addition, multiple and redundant sensors are deployed in ADV but processing those sensors data leads to heavy computational cost. There has been a lack of efficient ways to reduce the computational cost of the sensor data.